The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing relaxing and eliminating some of the regulations on diesel trucks that were costing truckers money and lost performance. More trouble had been mandated in 2027. EPA hasn’t fixed everything yet, but the commenting period will be lively.
The Supreme Court with rulings in the Loper case restricted overreaching federal agency power. Those decisions have benefited agriculture, rolling back regulations damaging farms and ranches. This term, the court has defined the president’s power to fire executive branch personnel and independent board members.
S.T. Karnick, writing for Townhall in a July 4 column, described the Trump v. Slaughter decision this way: “The executive branch is designed for a thoroughly good purpose: to stop Congress and the courts from putting unconstitutional laws and actions into effect. Under the founders’ vision, the president defends the Constitution by blocking the implementation of actions by the other two branches that threaten individual rights.
“It is a purely defensive provision, designed to protect the rights of the people from subversion by a majority (the legislature) or an elite (a court, an agency, a private concern). In the founders’ plan, the president is the last line of defense against government trampling on individual rights.”
Conservatives have been frustrated with the U.S. Senate’s inaction, acting like they have lots of time. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sudden passing should remind them that is never true. He was Budget Committee chairman and that could make getting reconciliation bills done harder.
Fed cattle prices and boxed beef prices have jumped around in recent weeks. Sounds like markets responding to supply and demand, not market manipulation. If big packers had the power to manipulate prices, why have they arranged to lose hundreds of millions?
USDA corrections lowered the reported latest beef export numbers by 90%. There has been a lot of skepticism about government statistics recently, especially given the increasing frequency and size of the revisions in economic data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Evidently, that disease has spread to USDA. Revising the beef export numbers 90% was still shocking, especially given that those numbers come from hundreds of sources at most, compared to the thousands involved in general economic data. The agency is blaming it on staffing cuts, but that sounds weak. Tweaks and revisions are one thing. Being almost 100% off begs better explanation and some investigation.
Part of Vice President JD Vance’s responsibility is explaining and supporting the administration’s economic policy. While President Donald Trump is not a complete economic conservative, he is usually a supply-side, free market businessman opposing big government socialism and very vocal that this will never be a communist country. So when Vance gave an interview recently disparaging the economic philosophies of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher and claiming free market capitalism and the merit-based culture of America is bad for citizens, many folks were genuinely shocked. They expected some context that would explain his statements or the usual political tactic of walking back his statements. He didn’t.
The whole idea of the free market is that Americans have the liberty to make something of themselves, to take responsibility for providing for themselves and their family and for the government to provide only basic services and otherwise get out of the way.
The ’80s was characterized by its detractors as the greedy decade because people worked, invested, accomplished things and were proud of their progress, instead of allowing government to take and redistribute their accumulated wealth. Ronald Reagan fought that greed description, espousing the idea that taking care of yourself and your family helped the country prosper. Citizens in a free country should not expect or allow the government to take care of everyone.
This is doubly disturbing now, given that we have seen young and uninformed voters voting for socialists and outright communists, and government shockingly allowing people to fraudulently game the system and steal taxpayers’ money.
America has not created the best economy and the most socially uplifting culture for 250 years based on socialist and communist creeds. A politician that claims that succeeding on one’s merit is wrong does not understand America’s basic principles, is not separating ambition from greed and does not help an administration promoting free market, supply-side economics.
Vance has not done his presidential ambitions any favor by espousing ideas closer to the leftist-socialist-Marxist-communist government philosophy than the free market. Maybe he should talk to Marco Rubio about what socialist, communist governments have done to Cuba. — Steve Dittmer, WLJ columnist
(Steve Dittmer is the author of the Agribusiness Freedom Foundation newsletter. Views in the column do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of WLJ or its editorial staff.)
